In my last post I’d mentioned that I would describe the way I managed to get my swipe file organized. I first setup a whole bunch of different notebooks I could move everything to. I tried to keep the different notebooks as different in subject matter as I could to avoid as much overlap as I could.

The main category I set up was “Design”. I was originally going to call it “Graphic Design”, but I felt that graphic design was a bit too limiting as my interest in design also leans towards product design as well.

I also have notebooks set up for Illustration, Tutorials, Web and Technology, Typography, Quotes, and Photography.

I hesitantly set up a “Misc” notebook as a catchall to hold anything that didn’t fit in any of the other categories. I’m not a big fan of this. Open folders like that tend to get abused and can make it hard to search for stuff afterwards. But I knew there were a few things like recipes and workout tips that I have starred in the now defunct Google Reader that wouldn’t really fit in a designer’s swipe file.

As a side note, once it was getting close to Google Reader’s termination date of July 1st, 2013, I checked out all my data and used the instructions found here to move all my starred items into Evernote. The instructions found here put everything into a local notebook. I then proceeded to move everything to the synced notebooks so I could access these any time I wanted to. This forced me to buy a Pro account in Evernote so I could move all those megabytes online. Hopefully good things will come of that!

Once all my digital files were all sorted, I set about getting as much of my analog swipe files stashed away into Evernote as well. Evernote has a camera feature built in, but it takes files at full resolution, and I don’t need anything quite so ambitious. So I used the app, FastEver Snap. All it does is take photos at a user specified resolution and upload them to Evernote in a specified notebook. Easy peasy.

Tag, you’re it!

I probably won’t do much in the way of tagging. The only main use I think I’ll have for tagging will be to keep track of notes for specific projects. Usually, all I would do is just browse through my swipe file and pull out whatever I think is relevant to the project at hand. Tagging items with a project name rather than making a notebook for each project would then make it easy to find the relevant data, and will keep down the number of notebooks to a minimum.

Recap

So here’s two screenshots from my iPhone, showing the before and after.

Before. A simple, but disorganized mess. Good luck finding anything in there.

After. Looking much better. I now have a chance to find stuff. Browsing will be easier too. [Evernote for iOS]